Tag Archives: north cascade highway

The Mountain Colors Are So Good They Look Fake

Driving up the North Cascades highway towards Washington Pass, the scenery looked great.  I realized that there was a good spot to pull over as we headed up and figured I would stop on the way back.  When we returned, I pulled off to take some shots and there were lots of other people doing likewise.  The sun was out and shining on the peaks around us but there was plenty of color in the mountains.  As I looked at it, I felt like it was somehow a creation of some movie maker rather than something I was looking at.  The colors looked amazing.  The shots conveyed the color pretty well but I fear that I was going to be assumed to have gone to town on the saturation slider.  This is exactly how it looked!

Diablo Dam

My sister was visiting so we took a trip up into the Cascades across the North Cascades Highway.  Having traveled this way before, I had photographed some of the dams already.  This time, we got a closer look at Diablo Dam.  You can drive down to the dam and across the top of it to get to the facilities on the other side.  The dam is wide enough for two vehicles to pass although that might not be obvious given the way some of the drivers behaved.

The spillways on either side of the dam look a lot bigger when you get close to it than is the case when looking from a distance.  The chance to see it up close, given that so many of the dams in the mountains are rather inaccessible, was pretty cool.